don't know what to say, the monkeys won't do (part two!)

Summers are full of lazy days without much to do. Maybe we should be planning more interesting events in our lives, I'm sure there is a lot more to do. But frankly, it is the summertime and I don't know if I ever grew out of the summer time laziness that school bred into me. We do have other big events for later in the summer months, but we can enjoy this lull while we have it. [and read lots! :)]

Last week, our local grocer was selling 2 pounds of strawberries for $2.69. While that might not be the best price in the world (we casually picked up six pounds and froze them), after asking around at all the u-pick places in the area, we come to find out this is the best deal ever offered in the bay area. With that knowledge in our pocket, it was time to act and act fast. We purchased several more 2 lb. boxes and decided to make the plunge into the home canning industry. Of course this means picking up canning supplies and cans, which we thought we could get locally. We were wrong. Apparently, the idea of "canning your own food" is a really foreign concept to the bay area citizens. No surprise there. But also we learned that my parents' method of steam canning as opposed to pressure canning is out of mode. Which meant looking at pressure canners. And then serendipitously deciding last moment that we would much rather like the convenience of steam canners and my family never died from eating steam canned food.

That said, we now have on the way to our house: lots of pint jars and everything we need to get this strawberry season underway. Really what I want now is to stop off in Oregon on our way north in a few weeks to pick up a ton of huckleberries and blackberries to make wonderful Oregon jam.

While Rebecca has been at work, I have started into a few of the collaborative projects my fellow colleagues and I are working on. It seems rather cushy to be spending hours everyday playing an online video game, but when you're trying to figure out how to "do" something with it because it is such a prevalent corner in our contemporary society, MMORPGs become a behemoth which is hard to wrap your mind around. Several conversations later, we still don't have a clear direction -- there's something there which we need to grasp; but for the time being it is out of our reach.

Back down from la-la land, Saturday was heavy cleaning day. Rebecca spent several hours "dusting," which consists of her starting dusting, then getting distracted by the dirty floorboards, then getting distracted by the dirty fridge, then getting distracted by the dirty walls, etc. You get the idea. In the meantime, I was at campus learning how to silkscreen shirts and tackling one of the projects we had planned for this summer. The shirts turned out nice and I have one for Rebecca and myself, definitely a good experience for teamwork and collaboration of all involved. [and Wayne helped finish the cleaning when he came home and saved me from adding yet more things to the list to clean! -beck]

To take a break, we dipped our feet (and some other parts of us) in the swimming pool for a while and got good and tired racing from one end to the other. And then read books the rest of the evening. It was a good Saturday, but probably not one to write home about. [and yet we wrote about it...] Thus, a good end to this week. And this entry.